Masking Apostasy

Question: Why do so many politicians of modern times talk right-wing while acting left-wing? Because the people want to go left while pretending to stay right. And why do the crowds want to slide leftwards while pretending not to do so? Because they want to bask in a godless future even while they pay hypocritical homage to a godly past.

For if there is one word to sum up the last 500 years of world history, it is the word “apostasy,” i.e. a falling away from God. Now, ever since God revealed himself in the Incarnation, that has meant a falling away from the Incarnate God, Our Lord Jesus Christ, and His Catholic Church. Before the Incarnation, apostasy could never be so clear. Ever since the Church established Christendom, if one wished to descend from those medieval heights, it made such apostasy necessary.

But from the end of the Middle Ages onwards it was so clear that those heights were truly high, that all those choosing to descend had to honour what they were quitting even while they were quitting what they claimed to honour. Hence the hypocrisy intrinsic to, for instance, liberal and socialist politicians. For instance, when somebody tried to sing the praises of Communism to Winston Churchill, he snorted: “Christianity with a tomahawk!”

However, as usual since the Incarnation, the heart of the problem lies not in politics but in the Church. “Left-wing” and “right-wing” are terms arising from the division of the French Revolutionaries of 1789 into violent and only semi-violent, destroyers of the Old Order, that of throne and – altar. Now King Louis XVI was guillotined, but the real target was the altar. Therefore what differentiates left-wingers from right-wingers is their more or less explicit apostasy.

So when Cardinal Suenens described Vatican II as the French Revolution of 1789 within the Church, it is not surprising if the mass of churchmen divided into extreme or only moderate destroyers of the Old Order, i.e. of the true religion. But, as in 1789, the moderates were, and remain, destroyers still. Woe then to churchmen of today who would try to blend with these “moderates”! They risk adding themselves on to the end of a 500-year list of hypocritical traitors, however well-meaning!

Kyrie eleison.